Parly committee wants in-person human verification audit to root out ‘ghost workers’
Parliament’s Public Service and Administration Committee’s chairperson, Jan de Villiers, said ‘ghost workers’ are an organised crime and cost departments millions of rand paying salaries to fake employees.
Chairperson of Parliament's Public Service and Administration Committee, Jan de Villiers, briefed the media on the work of his committee on 3 March 2025. Picture: PHANDO JIKELO/PARLIAMENT
CAPE TOWN - Parliament’s Public Service and Administration Committee wants an in-person human verification audit of all government employees to root out “ghost workers”.
The committee’s chairperson, Jan de Villiers, said ghost workers are an organised crime and cost departments millions of rand paying salaries to fake employees.
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De Villiers highlighted the need to root out the fraud during a governance cluster briefing in Parliament on Monday.
De Villiers said the phenomenon of ghost workers is not “merely a payroll anomaly” and is rather an orchestrated form of systemic corruption and organised crime within the state.
De Villiers gave an example of the Gauteng Health Department, which froze the salaries of 230 employees who could not be verified.
But de Villiers said a data audit alone is not enough.
“We are calling for this process to begin with a physical, in-person human verification audit of all government employees underpinned by mandatory biometric identification. Every person drawing a public salary must appear in person and be verified.”
He said the committee will reconvene with the department and National Treasury in the third quarter of 2025 to receive a full progress report on the implementation of the joint ghost worker audit strategy.